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2nd Call For Papers

MATES 2012 - Tenth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies
"Research and Innovation for a Smarter Society"

!! DEADLINE EXTENSION !!
Abstracts due: EXTENDED May 7, 2012 (April 21, 2012)
Full papers due: EXTENDED May 14, 2012 (April 28, 2012)

October, 10th-12th, 2012
Trier, Germany
http://mates2012.uni-trier.de
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The German conference on Multi-Agent system TEchnologieS (MATES) provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users (members of business and industry) and developers of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The thematic focus of this MATES 2012 is on technologies that enable societies and organisations to be more resilient, inter-connected and collaborative. The conference investigates technologies for truly open distributed systems --- covering a wide spectrum of approaches from self-organization and autonomous systems to agreement computing. Advances in research work, as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents will be presented and discussed. The conference covers the whole range from theory to application of agent- and multi-agent technologies in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. The conference will also host a doctoral consortium.

For the tenth time the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence jointly with the steering committee of MATES organizes this international conference in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. Building on the sequence of agent-related events in Germany in the past such as VDI 1998 (Chemnitz), VertIS 2001 (Bamberg), and KI 2002 (Aachen), the MATES conference series (from 2003 to 2011) now is exclusively devoted to agents and multi-agent systems, and the cross-fertilization between agent theory and application. This year is also the 20th year of the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence – another reason for an inspiring conference on agents! The conference language is English.

Salve – welcome to Trier! The conference takes place in Germany’s oldest city - close to Saarbrücken, Frankfurt/Main and Luxemburg as well as the well-known Leibniz Center for Informatics (Schloss Dagstuhl).

The MATES series has been ranked by the Computing Research & Education initiative as a CORE B conference. The proceedings will be published as Springer LNCS.

Contact: mates2012@easychair.org

INVITED SPEAKER

TBC Jeff Bradshaw

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Ph.D., Cognitive Science, University of Washington) is a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) where he leads the research group developing the KAoS policy and domain services framework. With Marco Carvalho, he co-leads the development of the Luna Agent Framework and the IHMC Cyber Framework, designed to address requirements of situation awareness, anticipation, responsiveness, teamwork, and efficiency of large distributed network operations centers at a national scale. Formerly, he led research groups at The Boeing Company and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

MATES 2012 welcomes contributions from the field of agent-oriented computing and agent technologies. We solicit both basic as well as applied research papers on recent advances in the area of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems in general. Also papers reporting on the successful application of agent technologies in any kind of domain are very welcome. MATES 2012 encourages submissions from recent and emerging areas of interest such as a Autonomic Computing, Self-organisation and Agreement Technologies. Additionally, we encourage the submission of elaborated vision and challenge papers that discuss mid-term and long-term directions for research and application.

The topics of interest for MATES-2012 include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Agent-based simulation and analysis of social networks
• Agents and communities
• Large-scale agent-based simulation of cities, economies, etc.
• Adaptive agents and multi-agent learning
• Advanced theories of collaboration: Modelling and formation of teams, coalitions, groups, and organizations
• Agents and autonomic computing
• Agent and multi-agent architectures
• Agents and peer-to-peer computing
• Agents and pervasive computing
• Agents for Ambient Intelligence
• Agent-based service discovery, matchmaking, brokering, and composition
• Agent communication languages
• Agents for e-business and e-government
• Agent technologies in the context of service-oriented computing and architectures
• Agent to non-agent interoperability
• Agents in novel applications
• Application of agent-technologies in industrial practice
• Artificial social systems: Conventions, norms, institutions; trust and reputation
• Autonomous robots and robot teams
• Commitment, delegation, responsibility, and obligations in artificial and hybrid societies
• Complex systems and their management
• Coordination, negotiation, argumentation, and conflict resolution
• Deployed agent-based business applications
• Hybrid human and agent societies
• User modelling and interface agents
• Embodied conversational actors and believable agents
• Mobile agents
• Model-driven design of multi-agent systems
• Multi-agent-based simulation
• Multi-agent planning and scheduling
• Multi-agent platforms and tools
• Multi-agent (social) simulation and (cognitive) modelling with agents
• Practical aspects of programming agent systems: Robustness, fault tolerance, scalability and performance measurement
• Roles and structures, adaptive learning and cognition in organizational models
• Semantics of the dynamics of organizational models
• (Semantic) web services and agents
• Standards for agents and multi-agent systems

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Paper submissions to MATES-2012 will be handled using the EasyChair system at this link: www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mates2012.

Submissions must comply with the following requirements:

* For preparation of papers to be submitted please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
* The length of each paper including figures and references shall not exceed 14 pages.
* All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format.
* Papers that have been accepted or are under review by other conferences or journals are not eligible for submission. However, we encourage interdisciplinary contributions submitted or presented in part to a forum outside of agent technology.

Submissions not conforming to the above instructions may be rejected without review.

Please notice that the submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present the work.

MATES 2012 will include a doctoral mentoring program: This program will provide an opportunity for students to interact closely with established researchers in their fields, to receive feedback on their work and to get advice on managing their careers.

The Doctoral Mentoring Program will:

* Match each student with an established researcher who will act as a mentor.
* Allow students an opportunity to present their work to a friendly audience of other students, as well as mentors.
* Provide students with contacts and networking opportunities.

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstracts due: EXTENDED May 7, 2012 (April 21, 2012)
Full papers due: EXTENDED May 14, 2012 (April 28, 2012)
Notification: June 19, 2012
Doctoral mentoring: July 13, 2012
Camera-ready submission: July 13, 2012
Early registration: August 5, 2012
Conference: October 10-12, 2012

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

* Christian Guttmann (EBTIC - Etisalat BT Innovation Centre, UAE)
* Ingo J. Timm (U Trier, Germany)

PROGRAMM COMMITTEE

Klaus-Dieter Althoff, DFKI / University of Hildesheim, Germany
Bernhard Bauer, Uni Augsburg, Germany
Holger Billhardt, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Vicent Botti, DSIC, Italy
Lars Braubach, University of Hamburg, Germany
Joerg Denzinger, University of Calgary, Canada
Juergen Dix, Clausthal University of Technology, Germany
Torsten Eymann, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Maria Ganzha, University of Gdansk, Poland
Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Benjamin Hirsch, EBTIC / Khalifa University, UAE
Tom Holvoet, K.U.Leuven, The Netherlands
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina, USA
Stefan Kirn, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany
Matthias Klusch, DFKI, Germany
Daniel Kudenko, University of York, UK
Stefano Lodi, University of Bologna, Italy
Beatriz López, University of Girona, Spain
Marco Luetzenberger, Technische Universität Berlin / DAI Labor, Germany
Daniel Moldt, University of Hamburg, Germany
Joerg Mueller, Clausthal University of Technology, Germany
Eugénio Oliveira, Faculdade de Engenharia Universidade do Porto - LIACC, Portugal
Andrea Omicini, Alma Mater Studiorum–Università di Bologna, Italy
Julian Padget, University of Bath, UK
Marcin Paprzycki, IBS PAN and WSM, Poland
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Austria
Alexander Pokahr, University of Hamburg, Germany
Marco Schorlemmer, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, IIIA, CSIC, Spain
Frank Schweitzer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Denis Trcek, Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Rainer Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, ICB, Germany
Gerhard Weiss, University Maastricht, The Netherlands
Cees Witteveen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

STEERING COMMITTEE

* Matthias Klusch (DFKI, Germany)
* Winfried Lamersdorf (U Hamburg, Germany)
* Jörg P. Müller (TU Clausthal, Germany)
* Paolo Petta (U Vienna, Austria)
* Rainer Unland (U Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
* Gerhard Weiss (Maastricht U, The Netherlands)

--
Christian Guttmann, PhD
iCare Theme Leader
http://events.kustar.ac.ae/EBTIC/Staff/Christian_Guttmann.html
EBTIC (Etisalat BT Innovation Centre)
Khalifa University
Abu Dhabi Campus
PO Box 127788
Abu Dhabi UAE
Tel: +97124018125